"Myths of origin" or "creation myths" represent an attempt to render
the universe comprehensible in human terms and explain the origin of the
world. The most widely accepted account of beginning of things as reported
by Hesiod's Theogony, starts with Chaos, a yawning nothingness. Out of
the void emerged Ge or Gaia (the Earth) and some other primary divine beings:
Eros (Love), the Abyss (the Tartarus), and the Erebus. Without male assistance
Gaia gave birth to Uranus (the Sky) who then fertilised her. From that
union were born, first, the Titans: six males and six females (Oceanus,
Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne,
Phoebe and Tethys, and Cronus); then the one-eyed Cyclopes and the Hecatonchires
or Hundred-Handers. Cronus ("the wily, youngest and most terrible of [Gaia's]
children")castrated his father and became the ruler of the gods with his
sister-wife Rhea as his consort and the other Titans became his court.
This motif of father/son conflict was repeated when Cronus was confronted
by his son, Zeus. Zeus challenged him to war for the kingship of the gods.
At last, with the help of the Cyclopes,(whom Zeus freed from Tarturus),
Zeus and his siblings were victorious, while Cronus and the Titans were
hurled down to imprisonment in Tartarus.

The earliest Greek thought about poetry considered the theogony to be
the prototypical poetic genre ? the prototypical mythos ? and imputed almost
magical powers to it. Orpheus, the archetypal poet, was also the archetypal
singer of theogonies, which he uses to calm seas and storms in Apollonius'
Argonautica, and to move the stony hearts of the underworld gods in his
descent to Hades. When Hermes invents the lyre in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes,
the first thing he does is sing the birth of the gods. Hesiod's Theogony
is not only the fullest surviving account of the gods, but also the fullest
surviving account of the archaic poet's function, with its long preliminary
invocation to the Muses. Theogony was also the subject of many lost poems,
including those attributed to Orpheus, Musaeus, Epimenides, Abaris and
other legendary seers, which were used in private ritual purifications
and mystery-rites. There are indications that Plato was familiar with some
version of the Orphic theogony. A few fragments of these works survive
in quotations by Neoplatonist philosophers and recently unearthed papyrus
scraps. One of these scraps, the Derveni Papyrus now proves that at least
in the 5th century BC a theogonic-cosmogonic poem of Orpheus was in existence.
This poem attempted to outdo Hesiod's Theogony and the genealogy of the
gods was extended back with Nyx (Night) as an ultimate beginning before
Uranus, Cronus and Zeus.

The first philosophical cosmologists reacted against, or sometimes built
upon, popular mythical conceptions that had existed in the Greek world
for some time. Some of these popular conceptions can be gleaned from the
poetry of Homer and Hesiod. In Homer, the Earth was viewed as a flat disk
afloat on the river of Oceanus and overlooked by a hemispherical sky with
sun, moon and stars. The Sun (Helios) traversed the heavens as a charioteer
and sailed around the Earth in a golden bowl at night. Sun, earth, heaven,
rivers, and winds could be addressed in prayers and called to witness oaths.
Natural fissures were popularly regarded as entrances to the subterranean
house of Hades, home of the dead.

The Roman model involved a very different way of defining and thinking
about gods than that of Greek gods. For example, if one were to ask a Greek
about Demeter, he might reply with the well-known story of her grief at
the rape of Persephone by Hades.

An archaic Roman, by contrast, would tell you that Ceres had an official
priest called a flamen, who was junior to the flamens of Jupiter, Mars,
and Quirinus, but senior to the flamens of Flora and Pomona. He might tell
you that she was grouped in a triad with two other agricultural gods, Liber
and Libera. And he might even be able to rattle off all of the minor gods
with specialized functions who attended her: Sarritor (weeding), Messor
(harvesting), Convector (carting), Conditor (storing), Insitor (sowing),
and dozens more.

Thus the archaic Roman "mythology", at least concerning the gods, was
made up not of narratives, but rather of interlocking and complex interrelations
between and among gods and humans.

The original religion of the early Romans was modified by the addition
of numerous and conflicting beliefs in later times, and by the assimilation
of a vast amount of Greek mythology. We know what little we do about early
Roman religion not through contemporary accounts, but from later writers
who sought to salvage old traditions from the desuetude into which they
were falling, such as the 1st century BC scholar Marcus Terentius Varro.
Other classical writers, such as the poet Ovid in his Fasti (Calendar),
were strongly influenced by Hellenistic civilization models, and in their
works they frequently employed Greek beliefs to fill gaps in the Roman
tradition.